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  • Disclosure and Discretion in Roman Astrology: Manilius and His Augustan Contemporaries by Steven J. Green
  • Robert Hannah
Steven J. Green. Disclosure and Discretion in Roman Astrology: Manilius and His Augustan Contemporaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 248pp. Cloth, $78.00.

This book investigates the reception of astrology in late Republican to early Imperial Rome, with a particular focus on the Augustan–Tiberian period during which the poet Manilius, author of the Astronomica, likely lived. Green examines the degree to which astrology was acceptable in the elite Roman world of the early Empire, where the princeps, whether Augustus or Tiberius, could be both the beneficiary and patron and yet also the enemy and expeller of astrologers in Rome. He seeks to paint a picture of literary artists in Rome, who had to navigate with care a difficult course through the explication of astrology via more or less equivocation about this form of divination.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Manilius’ Astronomica,” comprises a single lengthy chapter examining Manilius’ poem. Green presents a culturally nuanced reading, seeking to describe the negotiation of the tension between the poet’s knowledge of the workings of astrology on the one hand, and his need to acknowledge the power and interests of the princeps on the other. The chapter analyses the deteriorating relationship between the poet-instructor and the assumed student (the “reader,” as opposed to the external, contemporary reader [the “Reader”]), as the student grows increasingly frustrated at failing to learn the intricacies of how to cast a horoscope. Some of that frustration (perhaps more for the “Reader” than the “reader”) stems from the lack of full disclosure by the instructor about the techniques of casting a horoscope, notably the absence of anything concrete concerning the planets, which are usually pivotal to horoscopal astrology (unless one accepts a non-planetary form, as has indeed been suggested to explain the lacuna in the poem). Green argues that the lesson that the instructor teaches is intended to fail, because of the nervousness about the practice of astrology in the early Empire, and since it was a technique intimately bound up in the fortunes of the first two emperors. So the Astronomica represents a process of disclosure combined with discretion by poets who sought to engage with a new and fundamentally foreign technique for foretelling the future, in a culture that had its own indigenous means of divination.

Part 2, “The Rise of Roman Astrology and Caesar’s Comet,” focuses in two shorter chapters on a history of the rise of astrology in Rome up to the time of Manilius, and on the philosophical considerations about this form of divination in the writings of Cicero. The orator’s de Divinatione and de Fato show, for Green, an evolution in the author’s views toward astrology. In the former work, Cicero approaches astrology as a foreign form of divination, which he can criticize with freedom partly because of that foreignness. But by the time he was writing de Fato, Cicero was living in a very different world, in which an extraordinary astronomical phenomenon, in the form of a comet, had been seen at the time of the funeral games in honor of Julius Caesar and had cleverly been interpreted [End Page 737] positively as a sign of the apotheosis of the Roman leader. The phenomenon and its interpretation gave an air of respectability to the slowly growing interest in astrology at the time.

In part 3, “Astrology for the Augustan Age,” Green presents a suite of six concise chapters and then a conclusion, which demonstrate the chronologically evolving interest in and negotiation of astrology in the Augustan age. An initial chapter introduces the importance of the zodiacal sign of Capricorn for Octavian as early as 44 b.c.e., when he consulted Theogenes in Apollonia with Agrippa, and both received apparently outstanding horoscopes. Green also briefly examines the possibility of astrology in architectural products of the age: Agrippa’s Pantheon and the “Meridian of Augustus.” He ends the chapter with a study of the imperial embrace of astrology, in the form of Thrasyllus as a “court astrologer,” in the retinue of Tiberius when he...

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